The other story, Right, Left, or Straight Ahead?, was written in December and consisted of three separate episodes, each one about seven pages long. A man named Lazlo Flute is out taking a walk in the country. He comes to a crossroads and must choose between the three possibilities of going left, right, or straight ahead. In the first chapter, he goes straight ahead and runs into trouble when he is attacked by a pair of thugs. Beaten and robbed, left for dead by the side of the road, he eventually regains consciousness, climbs back to his feet, and staggers on for another mile or so until he comes to a house, knocks on the door, and is let in by an old man, who inexplicably apologizes to Flute and begs his forgiveness. The man leads Flute to the kitchen sink and helps wash the blood off his face, still rattling on about how sorry he is and what a terrible thing he has done, but sometimes, he says, my imagination runs away from me and I just can’t help myself. He takes Flute into another room, a small study at the far end of the house, and points to a pile of handwritten pages on the desk. Take a look if you want, he says, and when the battered hero picks up the manuscript, he sees that it is an account of the things that have just happened to him. Such vicious characters, the old man says, I don’t know where they came from.
In the second part, Flute turns right instead of going straight ahead. He has no memory of what happened to him in the first chapter, and because the new episode starts with a blank slate, the fresh beginning seems to offer the hope that something less awful will happen to him this time, and indeed, after walking a mile and a half down the road to the right, he comes upon a woman standing beside a broken-down car, or what appears to be a broken-down car, for why would she be standing there in the middle of the countryside if the car worked, but as Flute approaches her, he sees that none of the tires is flat, the hood is not up, and the radiator is not spewing forth clouds of steam into the air. Still, there must be a problem of one sort or another, and as the unmarried Flute draws closer to the woman, he sees that she is exceptionally attractive, or at least to his eyes she is, and therefore he jumps at the chance to help her, not just because he wants to help her but because an opportunity has presented itself to him and he wants to make the most of it. When he asks her what the trouble is, she says she thinks the battery is dead. Flute opens the hood and sees that one of the cables has come loose, so he reconnects the cable and tells her to get back into the car and give it a try, which she does, and when the car starts up with the first turn of the key, the beautiful woman gives Flute a big smile, blows him a kiss, and promptly drives off, departing so quickly that he doesn’t even have time to jot down her license plate number. No name, no address, no number, and no way ever to reconnect with the enchanting specter who bolted in and out of his life in a matter of minutes. Flute walks on, sickened by his own stupidity, wondering why his chances in life always seem to slip through his fingers, tempting him with the promise of better things and yet always disappointing him in the end. Two miles later, the thugs from the first chapter reappear. They jump out from behind a hedge and try to wrestle Flute to the ground, but this time he fights back, kneeing one of them in the groin and poking the other one in the eye, and he manages to get away, running down the road as the sun sets and night begins to fall, and just when it is becoming difficult to make out much of anything, he comes to a bend in the road and sees the woman’s car again, parked next to a tree this time, but the woman is gone, and when he calls out to her and asks where she is, no one answers. Flute runs off into the night.
In the third part, he turns left. It is a gorgeous afternoon in late spring, and the fields on either side of him are crammed with wildflowers, two hundred birds are singing in the crystalline air, and as Flute contemplates the various ways in which life has been both kind and cruel to him, he comes to the realization that most of his problems have been caused by himself, that he is responsible for having made his life such a dull and unadventurous one, and if he means to live life to the fullest, he should spend more time with other people and stop taking so many solitary walks.
WHY DO YOU give your characters such odd names? Nagle asked.
I don’t know, Ferguson said. Probably because the names tell the reader those characters are in a story, not the real world. I like stories that admit they’re stories and don’t pretend to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.
Gregor. A reference to Kafka, I suppose.
Or Gregor Mendel.
A brief smile flitted across the long, sad countenance. Nagle said: But you’ve read Kafka, haven’t you?
The Trial, The Metamorphosis, and about ten or twelve other stories. I’m trying to take it slowly because I like him so much. If I sat down and barreled through all the Kafka I still haven’t read, then there’d be no new Kafka to look forward to, and that would be sad.
Hoarding your pleasures.
That’s it. You’re given just one bottle, and if you drink it down all at once, you won’t have a chance to drink from the bottle again.
In your application, you say you want to be a writer. What do you think about the work you’ve done so far?
Most of it is bad, revoltingly bad. A few things are a little better, but that doesn’t mean they’re good.
And what’s your opinion of the two stories you sent us?
So-so.
Then why send them?
Because they’re the most recent ones, and also because they’re the longest ones I’ve written.
Off the top of your head, give me the names of five writers not named Kafka who’ve had the greatest impact on you.
Dostoyevsky. Thoreau. Swift. Kleist. Babel.
Kleist. Not many high school boys are reading him these days.
My mother’s sister is married to a man who wrote a biography of Kleist. He’s the person who gave me the stories.
Donald Marx.
You know him?
I know of him.
Five is too small a number. I feel I’ve left out some of the most important names.
I’m sure of that. Dickens for one, right? And Poe, definitely Poe, and perhaps Gogol, not to speak of the moderns. Joyce, Faulkner, Proust. You’ve probably read them all.
Not Proust. The others, yes, but I still haven’t gotten around to Ulysses. I’m planning to read it this summer.
And Beckett?
Waiting for Godot, but nothing else so far.
And Borges?
Not a word.
What fun awaits you, Ferguson.
At this point, I’ve barely even made it to the beginning. Other than a few plays by Shakespeare, I still haven’t read anything written before the eighteenth century.